atomack

Here's an article citing research published this year that disputes the idea that our large brain was directly a result of access to extra protein from hunting meat:

"They concluded that the evidence for increased carnivory in our ancestors is merely an effect of increased sampling of the archaeological record at certain time intervals starting around two million years ago, meaning that there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/fourt...

David Cope's been making algorithmic music for a while - not current but worth knowing about: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/

edit: There's also this on ambient endless generative music that I think was an HN submission a couple of years ago https://generative.fm/

The way we used arxiv worked well in physics, though this is 15 years ago now so might have changed since.

arxiv was about distribution. It didn't replace peer review - articles were still submitted to journals and published there too.

If an article was posted to arxiv and not a journal, the odds of a citation went down massively. And the journal it was submitted to was a factor in whether or not we read it. When articles were eventually published, most authors also updated the preprint with the post peer review version.

Basically it meant that (1) it was easy to keep up to date with what everyone was working on, and pick up interesting new stuff (2) most citations, post 80s, you saw in whatever paper you were reading, you could look up on arxiv and be reading it in seconds.

In quantum mechanics, it's a wave function. Wavelike, but not a wave; particle-like, but not a particle.

One solution is make sure more women can compose music for piano

Good points. I'd add to this that small hands are actively advantageous for a lot of repertoire.

Bach fugues, say, or fast intricate passages can be a nightmare for long-fingered pianists to get their hands around. The OPs focus on big Liszt or Rachmaninov chords is understandable but there's so much more to piano playing.

Interesting to put this view of the anthropocene next to David Graeber's and how he thinks it shaped the evolution of human society

https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

He and David Wengrow ask why "the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors"

I think to some extent they're forced to peak young. I don't believe musicians are actually at their best when they are young and I'd claim recordings of classical artists through their lives supports this.

For classical music, competitions and conservatoires will only take young people and if you don't go through their processes there's no chance of getting auditions for pro gigs.

I wonder if the author is one of those who needs a few more years to understand themselves well enough to perform at the highest level, by which time she'll be to old to pursue music professionally

According to this guys reading of the burrow: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10/how-to-read-kafka-pa... my efforts at factorio are very kafkaesque

One point regarding whether or not this is unphysical is that in physical systems, conceptually we work in finite systems and at the only very end of our calculations we take the infinite limit while holding physically observable quantities fixed. This is the essence of the thermodynamic limit.

In these paradoxes, infinities are present from the outset and I think it's this that leads to the unphysical outcome. They're not wrong. They are mathematical paradoxes. But it's not a problem they are unphysical (from a physics point of view) because physics uses mechanisms, like the thermodynamic limit, to handle infinite limits sensitively. Then the paradox goes away.

For instance, the 'physics' version of the Hilbert hotel problem would say there are two hotels, one with N rooms and the other with M rooms. Then do all the renumbering you like, the paradoxical situation of filling both hotels and then putting all guests from both hotels into one of them is no longer possible. Finally, if you want to think about hotels with an infinite number of rooms take N and M to inifinity keeping N/M fixed

Edit: add physicified version of Hilbert hotel problem

+1 for Paul Sellers. He's a bunch of content on finishing too and I've just tried his combo of shellac + beeswax to finish pine and it works fantastically and is cheap.

Also, not youtube, but https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/ is a great uk online resource, including this thread https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/timber-yards-wip-add-you... on sourcing timber

Yes, something like that. As I mentioned elsewhere, I wonder if the result might be affected by the acoustics of the room as well as the physical proximity of the sound sources

Somehow the audience also manages to adjust too, trained or not. The violins and cellos are several metres apart yet I think the audience would agree whether they come off together or not, regardless of where they're sitting in the auditorium

I wonder if actually it's the delays plus reverb we manage to adjust to. I remember playing church organ too, a while back, and I found the delays much easier to get used to than say a 4 or 5 ms delay in a DAW, even though the delay was probably much bigger. It's like it's training + room acoustics that we use to adjust, rather than the raw numbers of the physical delay

But I could play either Jerry Lee Lewis style, arms length from the keyboard with my head back, or Glenn Gould style, hunched over the keyboard and my head moves a metre between the two. So that's around the 3ms threshold where I (and the sound engineer above) claim to be able to detect delays, and yet I don't think I'd notice a delay between those two playing positions

There's something weird here though. I reckon more 4 or 5 ms of latenecy is enough to put me off playing something in time (this is about what you aim for using DAWs to record music) and yet if you just think about playing a piano, the player's ear is about 1m from where the sound is generated. The speed of sound in air is ~300m/s so there's 3 ms of delay right there, even if the hammer mechanism is instantaneous, and I've never heard a pianist complain about delay.

Maybe it's just familiarity but even that feels too simple an explanation

I'm not sure (1) is 'obviously possible'. Supposing there's a finite number of atomic configurations that produce Abraham Lincoln, there's still an infinite number of atomic configurations so you're probability is strictly zero, no? It's not even an 'age of the universe to achieve' type event. And that assumes that your random throwing together of atoms includes the physical preconditions to create an Abraham Lincoln. For instance, if you were sitting in the middle of a black hole randomly assembling atoms I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible to create an Abraham Lincoln.

Reminds me of this, https://www.businessinsider.com/steven-strogatz-interview-on..., interview with Steven Strogatz, when he gets onto the idea (and dangers) of what beauty means in maths.

Also, this https://plus.maths.org/content/andrew-wiles-what-does-if-fee... from Andrew Wiles, when he mentions that maths, the actual doing of it at least, isn't so much the cold hard logic of formal equations, that's just how it's communicated. It's the sitting down and trying to grapple with some mathematical ideas when it becomes more akin to musical experience.

iirc, there's a passage in Godel, Escher, Bach where Hofstadter actually works through a mathematical calculation and compares its cadences with musical experience. And there's the poems of Rebecca Elson (Theories of Everything, Explaining Relativity) that do the best job, for me, of describing what is actually appealing about maths.

Like this article, they all emphasise the joy of just sitting down and playing with mathematical ideas. That that is where the understanding and fun really is, though difficult to communicate directly. It's not so much the technical bits of learning formulae and grinding results out of them that, at least when I was at school, was all we ever really did.

I'm not sure I quite share your view of what art aims to do. Iris Murdoch had a line that tyrants fear art because art forces them to confront the truth.

If one believes, as Murdoch suggests, that art aims to express a truth as clearly as possible then the qualities of good technical writing and good fiction are entirely compatible. I'd suggest the distinction lies more in the extent to which the sensibilities of the author are present in the writing.

For instance, Vonnegut's guidelines on good writing (summarised here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/14/how-to-write-with-s...) could equally be applied to technical writing as fiction, I think.

Maybe I'm a luddite but I used books.

Any book on common practice harmony will help with most pop/rock and classical up to 20th century. I used Harmony by Piston and happily recommend it. For some jazz theory The Jazz Piano Book by Levine was good for me.

I agree with GTP, the author's definition is vague. As GTP alludes to, temperature is defined perfectly clearly in statistical mechanics, through the sensitivity of the entropy to changes in the internal energy of a system (though there are several, equivalent ways to express it). The author really is incorrect to claim temperature is not a clearly understood concept

I agree with you completely. I agree with the conclusion, but the way the author gets there just looks wrong to me. I feel the scientific method is mischaracterised throughout, for example when the author says it's one of "intentional ignorance" where scientists only look at certain facts an leave out others, the point is they aim to include as many as they need to capture the phenomena they're looking at.

Elsewhere, the article's just wrong. It claims "the concept of temperature lacks clear meaning" amongst scientists. This isn't true: temperature has a perfectly clear meaning through statistical mechanics.

I came away with the feeling the author doesn't really understand the science under discussion, which is frustrating because I share the conclusion and I think it's an interesting question

I think it means order in a way that's quite specific to the study of phase transitions. In a phase transition a system switches between a disordered phase (eg a gas) and an ordered phase (eg a solid) as measured by a so-called 'order parameter'. Here the transition is that of percolation (google it, or percolation theory, for detail - it's a big subject by itself) which, in 2 dimensions say, transitions between a phase where the order parameter is zero and there are just disconnected clusters with an expontential size distribution, and a phase where the order parameter is non-zero and a cluster is connected across the entire system. The critical point at which the transition actually occurs tends to be the point of most interest and it's characterised by power law distributions. So it's a slightly broader definition of order than people outside the subject might be accustomed to.

Here, they analyse percolation on a random geometry and look at how this influences the percolation transition. For instance, how the size of the largest cluster scales with system size. This isn't new in itself, it's been an interesting problem for at least a couple of decades. Just skimming the paper, I _think_ what's new here is one or two new results for the combination of this particular random geometry and percolation. I have to say, I didn't quite get the sense of novelty from the paper that I felt the title of the article promised.

It's a good point that uncertainty relations exist for all kinds of physical observables. But whether they're expressed as commutation relations or as in Heisenberg's original formulation, or whatever formulation you choose (wave mechanics, matrix mechanics, dirac representation, qft, or anything else one can think of) it's still asserted, rather than derived from an underlying set of fundamental physical objects and interactions.

I'd say that's more a mathematical statement than physical derivation. The effort of subjects like string theory is to lay down fundamental objects and interactions from which other theories (quantum mechanics, gravity) emerge. But I don't think there is a final word at the moment of what the fundamental theories than result in quantum mechanics should look like.

Yes, I like these sources too. Good for building intuition. I would just add that Heisenberg-like here means that both systems share features of wave mechanics. Doppler type effects aren't quantum mechanical though.

When I suggest the mechanism is unknown, I mean that Heisenberg uncertainty is a postulate of quantum mechanics. In other words the fundamental reason that quantum mechanics should appeal to wave mechanics isn't really established - we don't really know yet the fundamental objects and interactions that lead to quantum mechanics (despite much effort).

I feel this

-- phd in physics

It's a bit ungenerous to physicists to suggest they've simply shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The first couple of paragraphs outline reasons why quantum mechanics has gained so much traction. The various attempts to understand its more difficult results have turned out to be notoriously difficult to substantiate or disprove experimentally.

I don't actually dispute the socialogical forces the author describes as they apply to physics research but I don't think apparent lack of progress is due to lack of concern amongst the physics community.

I think david927's intuition is more correct here. The uncertainty in the position and momentum is intrinsic to quantum mechanics - it's built into the 'wave function'.

The suggestion that if one pushes away something by throwing something else builds on a purely classical intuition and wouldn't require quantum mechanics to explain if this was all we observed. The uncertainty in quantum mechanics is fundamental (to quantum mechanics) and emerges through a different, as yet unknown, mechanism.

In this context, closed system is term used in statistical mechanics that says that there are quantities (energy and particles) that may not enter or leave the system. So I would read this is 'if we assume that money plays the role of energy in statistical mechanics, what happens'.

I was a theoretical physicist when this paper came out. I remember talking to some econphysicists at the time, though neither of these two. While as a premise, it probably doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, I think the spirit is that even if one makes such a drastic assumption, can one still observe any observable features of actual economic systems.